PLATE XII
TRINITY COLLEGE LIBRARY, CAMBRIDGE: RIVER FRONT.
Noble as this design was, I confess I take more pleasure from Wren’s design for a monument (also in All Souls Library) which Sir Reginald Blomfield reproduces[C] with the note that it was probably drawn by Grinling Gibbons. It shows a lady reclining on a couch, not unlike Raggi’s Lady Cheyne in Chelsea Old Church, but she points with a lively gesture to cherubs flying above her in a burst of rays and clouds. It shows Wren in his most baroque mood, and is perhaps his reminiscence of old Bernini’s monumental manner.
In Scotland he did nothing; but the Royal Hospital at Kilmainham, near Dublin, is attributed to him with some reason. In 1679 he was ordered to view the site, but no record remains of his visit, and this Irish variant of Chelsea Hospital is not claimed by his son in the list of works. The building is simple and dignified with open cloisters round a big quadrangle. Probably Wren did designs for it and left some assistant or local architect to supervise its building. The best evidence for his authorship is that there was no architect in Ireland who could have produced such a design, with the possible exception of the designer of Beaulieu, near Drogheda.
Another charitable foundation, Morden College, Blackheath, is certainly Wren’s. It is an enchanting piece of brickwork with a pedimented centre-piece and lantern.
As Cambridge was the locus of his first completed work of importance, Pembroke Chapel (the Sheldonian is called in the Parentalia “the first publick Performance of the Surveyor,” but it was finished later than the chapel); it also gave him the opportunity for one of his greatest achievements, the Library of Trinity. His first design was for a circular building with a domed roof, but this soon gave place to the scheme that was carried out. A long memorandum by Wren explains his reasons for the design, which was limited by the need of joining the new Library to the extension of Neville’s Court, a junction which was not very happily achieved. The governing consideration of the elevation to the Court was the maintenance of the Library floor on the same level as the adjoining chambers. Unfortunately Wren would use two Orders despite the fact that the structure of the work was in conflict. Evidently he was forcing a design, naturally of a Palladian type, of a piano nobile on a lower storey which would be the podium of an Order. It is a case where his ingenuity overbore his artistic sense, and he resorted to the doubtful expedient of a range of arches, the tympana of which are filled in solid. The river front has been criticised on the grounds of an undue austerity, but I find it difficult to follow this: it is surely a miracle of dignity. For the interior of the Library there can be nothing but praise. Ideal in dignity and ideal in convenience, Wren’s book presses have the additional merit of showing Gibbons carving of peculiar excellence, and he must not be charged with the overcrowding of the floor by smaller cases needed by modern accessions of books.
Wren was less happy in his chapel and cloister at Emmanuel College. The breaking of the pediment of the central feature by the lantern turret is not in his usual vein, but the lantern itself is a very charming composition. Another related work is the Honywood Library and Cloister at Lincoln Cathedral, but the Library itself is a rather low and not specially distinguished apartment.
I bring this slight catalogue of Wren’s miscellaneous works to a close with a return to Oxford. It is difficult to determine how far he was responsible for the Library at Queen’s College (1693) because Hawksmoor was mixed up with him there, but the whole College must be regarded as a Wren building. There is nothing of Hawksmoor’s more faithful to his old master’s ideas, and less influenced by Sir John Vanbrugh’s, the two poles between which the lesser man was always oscillating. Sir Reginald Blomfield is strongly against attributing the Ashmolean to Wren, but it is difficult to believe that such a building at such a time could have been entrusted to anyone else. Similarly Trinity College Chapel (1694) is somewhat of a mystery. It has been said that Dean Aldrich was the architect and that Wren was only called in to advise. The quality of the design suggests that Wren was the senior partner in the combination. There is no confusion with regard to Tom Tower. Dr. Fell, Dean of Christ Church, commissioned him to build a tower over Wolsey’s gateway. The result is something certainly not Tudor, but quite certainly a picturesque composition of a high order. Wren’s detail is little like that of the sixteenth century below it, but he did the one thing needful: he provided a dignified and picturesque portal for the College, and it is folly to rebuke a late seventeenth-century architect for not entering into the spirit of his predecessors of the early sixteenth. The study of the spirit of Gothic work, alike systematic and sympathetic, is a growth of less than a hundred years. Wren was of his age.